My mother falls silent again in order to observe the effect of her words. I hear the tinkle of her bracelets slipping down toward her elbow, and think that perhaps she’s right. I myself have changed. Before, I felt no sense of oppression, and her constant, unconditional presence didn’t weigh on me as it does now, but that change is invisible, it hasn’t been replaced by anything, I haven’t transferred my affections to someone else. I’m the only one who knows about that change. There’s no outward sign of it. Or is there, I wonder, as her bracelets tinkle their way back down her arm and a cloud of smoke rises up above her head. Was the sudden attraction I felt for my father while I was pursuing him down those rainy streets, was that a real change? However momentary and troubling, was the brief sense of identity I felt as we stood there in the street, was that a way of replacing my mother, of confirming that she was no longer unique? I don’t know. I think about it, and it worries me, but I have no answer. Anyway, if it was true, that still wouldn’t resolve all the other unknowns or make what she’s saying any more significant. It isn’t that nothing has happened to make manifest or explicit what we both know without ever having spoken about it. It’s that there’s nothing to explain it. That’s the problem: the fact that nothing has happened to justify it is not the same as the fact that nothing has happened to confirm it. It’s the former that worries me, not the latter. I want to know what else there is apart from time passing. I want her to turn on the light so that I can see her vanishing face.
“Often, there’s no need for any specific motive. Sometimes all it takes for us to stop liking some dish we used to like is a bout of food poisoning or indigestion, but mostly such desertions are spontaneous. Without knowing why, we suddenly can’t abide a gesture made by the person we love most and that we used to find so amusing. Without knowing why, the friends we used to spend our leisure time with suddenly become boring, repetitive. I’m not saying this always happens, but often it’s the simple passage of time that distances us from them.”
My mother stops talking again, as if she didn’t know how to go on, just at the moment when a tiny fragment of ash falls from her cigarette. I watch it glow in the air and burn out before it touches her skirt, and at the same time, I hear the tinkle of her bracelets as her free hand hurriedly brushes the potential danger away, and I feel, as if I could actually hear it, the flow of her thoughts choosing the words she’s about to say.
“Maybe something like that has happened to us. Not only has no external factor urged us to speak about it, there weren’t really any clear reasons to do so. Why then and not now?”
My mother says exactly what I said to myself a few minutes before, and hearing those words on her lips startles me and makes me feel at even more of a disadvantage. It’s the second or third time that she’s responded to something I was thinking, and this, I tell myself, is proof that she has been building up to this conversation for a long time. It can’t be mere chance, she’s clearly thought about it a lot, she’s tried to have all the loose ends tied up before sitting down to talk to me. That’s why I’m listening to her and not believing her, but not feeling irritated, either. I’m aware only of my own incredulity, and I suddenly seem to understand why she doesn’t turn on the light, why she doesn’t even mention doing so. We’re sitting here in the near-darkness, and that’s not normal. She can see me better than I can see her, because she has the fading glow of evening in her favor, but it’s still not normal not to do something about that. She should want there to be light, she should get up and turn on the lamp. She doesn’t, because she feels insecure, she fears that her reasons aren’t convincing me. She’s nervous; I can see what her strategy is, and beneath it, I can see what she’s only thinking but not saying, the definitive void left by the person we don’t name, even though he’s there and he’s the explanation for everything.
“I don’t know why. I didn’t set any limit — this far and no further. He didn’t do anything he hadn’t done before, and I didn’t go against my own feelings as the result of some premeditated decision. I didn’t get up one morning thinking he’d gone too far and that, purely as a matter of survival, I should stop allowing things to continue as they were.”
So why keep talking about it, I wonder as I study the shadowy shape of her head, her hair pulled back, perfectly silhouetted against the darkness. Why not go straight to the thing she doesn’t want to tell me about? Why linger for so long over what didn’t happen? I’m listening to her and not believing her, because I don’t know what I prefer, or what would best alleviate the suffocating effect of those unworldly words focused entirely on me. I’m listening to her and not believing her, because it pains me to not believe her and I prefer to regret being unfair to her to not having that as an option. I realize that I’ve stopped listening, and it’s then that her voice, which was only a murmur, fades for a few seconds, giving her time to think about what she has said or perhaps to observe me, taking advantage of the darkness she has chosen. I can’t help thinking that it’s Paris she’s talking about without talking about it. Paris lies behind it all. It doesn’t matter if they were never there together and that it wasn’t Paris that separated them. The point is that she knows I’m thinking about Paris, that I’m plagued by uncertainty, and still she doesn’t mention it. She’s not going to unless I do, and I have no proof of anything. I’m not sure. I’m in a constant state of doubt. As I was a moment ago. As I am right now, not knowing if she really does know that I’m thinking about Paris.
“I can’t even say for sure that I was the only one who felt like that. Here I am trying to explain when or how I became aware that we would never live together again, when maybe he was the one who decided. He probably preempted any decision I might have made and has continued to act accordingly. Not that it makes much difference.”
I hear the unspoken bitterness in those last words, the first time I’ve heard her speak reproachfully of my father in my presence, and I’m not surprised. I consider it further confirmation of the definitive nature of this conversation, which will be the last of its kind once it’s over, there will be no others; whatever we do or whatever we become in the future will be built on what she tells me today, whatever she doesn’t tell me today, she will never tell me, because it would be suicidal to recant. I would never believe her again. This moment is too serious. She remains silent and, with a resolute movement, stubs out her cigarette and places the ashtray on the table while I ponder her words and, thanks to the pause, discover something I hadn’t noticed. Up until now, she has spoken in the first person, taking it as read that she was responsible for the breakup; she hadn’t previously left open the possibility that the breakup was initiated by him, and her silence on the matter betrays her, allows for such a possibility to exist. Otherwise, she would have been vaguer.
“But whether or not he did preempt my decision, the truth is that he never did anything to disillusion me, because I never had any illusions about him. Delfina thinks I did, because she can’t imagine any more powerful mandate than that of our instinct telling us not to take any risks in life that might lead to disaster. That’s the way she is, but not me. I knowingly chose that path; I knew all the obstacles awaiting me. It didn’t occur to me to think there might be no hope, because I knew from the start that there wasn’t. It’s just that everything has an end, and I suppose I’ve reached that end, but I’ve reached it without anything having happened that required it to end. That’s how it usually is. We may not always want to accept the fact, but we’re in constant motion. No one can guarantee anyone their unconditional love. Only the love between parents and their children is unconditional, and perhaps not even then. We mothers are very egotistical and would like to think that love between mother and child is unconditional, but it isn’t. We are clear proof that nothing lasts. There is no loyalty like that of a mother’s loyalty to her child, and yet all mothers know there will come a time when that child will break free and create his or her own bonds. However, that certainty, which I accept, that future lack of reciprocity, neither erases nor diminishes a mother’s love. It’s the same with other feelings. We don’t need our love to be requited in order to love someone else, just as we don’t need someone else to despise or hate us in order to despise or hate them. Often we choose the object of our affection without considering whether that person will feel the same, and often our idea of that person is very different from his idea of himself or his expectations of life or of us.”